NORTH LITTLE ROCK (AP) — Robert “Bob” McCord, a journalist who helped craft Arkansas’ open records law and spent decades defending it, has died. He was 84.

Griffin Leggett-Rest Hills funeral home said McCord died on Saturday.

McCord retired as an editor at the Arkansas Gazette prior to its acquisition by the Arkansas Democrat in 1992 and, for years, owned the North Little Rock Times.

McCord wrote a column for the weekly Arkansas Times from 1992 until 2006.

In an article posted at FOIArkansas.com, McCord noted that the Arkansas Constitution of 1874 gave legislators free rein to conduct business out of the public eye. The document said, “The sessions of each house and of committees of the whole shall be open unless when the business is such as ought to be kept secret.”

Passage of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act in 1967 put an end to the practice, McCord wrote.

A federal version of the FOI passed in 1966 and gave the Arkansas chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (then known as Delta Sigma Chi) momentum in trying to get the Arkansas Legislature to pass its own version.

“The organization had only about 20 members and no money to spend on lawyers,” McCord wrote. But the group picked up some free legal advice from advocates of open government and the group, with McCord helping, wrote a bill. The state’s major newspapers and The Associated Press took part in the effort.

“Amazingly,” McCord wrote, “the bill passed without a dissenting vote — 91-0 in the House, 32-0 in the Senate.”

Rockefeller signed the measure into law on Feb. 14, 1967.

It took about two months for the law to be challenged and McCord was in the middle of the fight.

After a North Little Rock City Council meeting, the panel gathered in Mayor Casey Laman’s office to talk with the city attorney. Reporters from the Arkansas Gazette and from the North Little Rock Times objected, McCord recalled, and the matter landed in court.

The case, Laman vs. McCord, went all the way to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which unanimously upheld the new law.

The FOIA has been challenged dozens of times since then, McCord noted.

“Each time the court’s decision has been in support of the principle of open government,” McCord wrote.

In 2005, when legislators filed numerous bills that sought to weaken the FOIA, McCord was among a number of journalists calling for the measures to be blocked. He singled out chambers of commerce, chiefs of police, economic development professionals and the Arkansas Municipal League as most common among those trying to weaken the public’s right to know.

McCord was national Society of Professional Journalists president in 1975-76.